Death Dance is my seventteenth novel and the thirteenth in my Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series, (UK JUNE  2010).

M y first crime series features Detective Inspector Joseph Rafferty and Sergeant Dafyd Llewellyn and has a strongly humorous element. When I first thought of writing a crime novel I took it for granted that it would have to feature a middle-class, middle-to-highbrow detective (as do P D James's Adam Dalgliesh, Colin Dexter's Morse, Ruth Rendell's Wexford etc). I almost gave up on the idea then as, being working-class and mostly self-educated, I thought it unlikely I would be able to 'walk the walk' or 'talk the talk' of the middle-classes.

But then, when I thought about the area of society from which the majority of police officers came, I realised I didn't have to adopt unnatural, middle-class mores; even in these days of graduate entrants, most recruits are still drawn from the working classes.

I had often longed for an injection of humour in the crime novels I read. At that time I hadn't come across any, though I have since found Reginald Hill's wonderful Dalziel & Pascoe books (what a creation is Andy Dalziel; you can practically smell him!), Ruth Dudley Edwards and Cynthia Harrod-Eagles's, to name but a few of the authors whose books delight me. For me, these were all the better for the humour injection; it added another dimension to the puzzle, which was what I hoped to achieve with my Rafferty & Llewellyn novels.

S o I came up with Joseph Aloysius Rafferty, like myself Catholic-raised and secondary modern educated (sic), from a working-class family who were far from averse to back-of-a-lorry bargains - particularly his Ma, Kitty Rafferty (widowed young, uneducated and working class with six kids to raise, how else was she expected to manage?!)

I felt this added a touch of reality - who - whatever their class - doesn't like a bargain? And the working classes - having less money - are even more likely to be prone to buying suspect 'bargains'. Why should a working-class policeman's family be any different?

This gave me the humorous element, with his family forever causing poor Rafferty problems. For his foil I hit on Dafyd Llewellyn - the university-educated only son of a Methodist minister - a Welshman more morally upright than the Pope, who thought the law should apply to everyone - even the mothers of detective inspectors.

S o I had my main characters. All I had to do then was write the novel…